“Behave Yourself”

5Ws Wednesday—What does it feel like…?

I’ve been submitting essays to publications hoping to secure my first “yes”. I have a few that I’ve been rotating through for various magazines. One essay that I particularly like is the one that describes how it has felt for me to be so scared to say what I’m thinking that I was practically silent to now being someone who has very little fear about speaking up. I thought that one would be perfect for the publication looking for works on “the human condition”. They didn’t agree apparently.

I’ll keep trying though. There’s got to be a place for something like that out there.

In the meantime, let me tell you the short hand version of what it feels like to not hold anything back…

Last week, I mentioned that I stood up to the “school bullies” at work. A supervisor and a person from upper admin pushed me too far. Everybody on my team complains about those two. But not to their faces. I did. Through emails and follow up phone calls and even a meeting in person. I said what everybody was thinking without a moment of hesitation.

Doing that led to emotional exhaustion. My doctors that week mentioned that I was likely suffering from PMDD. So technically it was the intense hormones that gave me the surge of inspiration to lash out professionally at the people who needed it.

Whatever the reason, I did it. And apparently everyone on my team eventually found out.

Yesterday, I got a text from one of my team members who works in a different building. She told me that she heard upper admin say she was coming to my building. She concluded her text with this:

That right there felt like I had won a hard fought victory. She told me to “behave” myself. Because she knew what I had said last week. And probably the other times before that. She knew that I will say something if something needs to be said. Her joke indicated that I was likely to do what I did all over again. That what I did, standing up for myself in the face of someone with more authority than me, was not just a fluke. A one off. I did it once, I’ll do it again. Apparently I am now known as someone who will do that.

And that feels like winning. It feels like I’m no longer the teenage version of myself who lets people at school make fun of her directly to her face without defending herself. It feels like I’m not the person who can’t tell her husband she wants to keep the bookshelf instead of taking it back because she doesn’t want him to be mad at her. It feels like I’m not the person who will spend almost $10,000 of her own money to go to grad school and get a masters degree that she doesn’t want because she’s afraid to tell her boss no.

At the end of the day, it feels like that’s just who I am now.